It is very interesting to compare the two poets’ point of view of the old age.
This paper tried to compare the view of old age held by W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot,
two great landmarks in modern British and American poetry. The problem of becoming
old is expressed differently in their poems: in Yeats’s poems the old man is more
emotional while the old man in Eliot’s is more reasonable. Yeats’s old men
experiencing oldness in their life process search for wisdom endlessly, while Eliot’s
oldness is only an imaginative work of a young poet, symbolizing degraded civilization.
We find the emotional wisdom in Yeats’s old men, but dark desperation in Eliot’s.
Eliot’s view is darker than Yeats’s in this respect. We can say that these two poets were
the old men even when they were still young. That they lived in desperate civilization
may have forced them to write such great poetry of old age, the image of their time.